Blogging Pedagogy - social media

The Great Beyond: Teaching Technologies from an Inexpert Perspective

Jeremy Smyczek — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:31:13 +0000

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Jeremy Smyczek

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As a teacher a generation older than most of my students, I begin to increasingly find myself in the role of “digital immigrant” to their “digital native” status. Most of us tend to be more familiar with technologies of our youths, inevitably falling behind the curve a bit as new media resemble the ones of our earlier days less and less. Part of this is social: beyond the convenience of the integration of social media and portable communications, there’s peer pressure towards having what the cool kids have, a pressure that recedes as high school social cliques dissipate and one’s friends in the professional world are more diverse in their purchasing tastes. Lacking a smart phone means I miss a lot of cool apps, sure, but that still doesn’t make me need a smart phone.

This isn’t a defense of technological disengagement (a poor idea, probably, in a digital humanities classroom), but rather accepting that there will over time be more technologies with classroom use potential—particularly forms of social media—that are more familiar to students than to me. Navigating this can be tricky in a class such as mine, a rhetoric course in which a digital advocacy project in response to the course’s theme (rhetoric and animal rights) accounts for the students’ final grade. It’s problematic on two distinct fronts: teaching unfamiliar technologies and evaluating materials made from them.

The first problem seems the easier one: between ubiquitous YouTube tutorials and the instructions imbedded within most new online media, it’s generally not too hard to learn new tools quickly. Most of them are designed to do just that, typically aimed at young users lacking the ability to write code. What has to underlie all this is the willingness of the instructor to learn enough of a given technology on the fly to walk with students through challenges arising during a project. Can’t ask them to do what we won’t, after all.

But online media tools are also designed to prepackage a good deal of imbedded labor, with the effect that hastily created projects can nevertheless be shiny and professional, at least in the production if not the quality of the advocacy. Hence, deciding how much comparative effort has gone into an InDesign poster campaign (an older technology with which I am familiar) or Wix.com page (a newer one with which I am not) can be difficult.

That last qualifier should indicate, though, that I’m not entirely sold on Marshall McLuhan’s claim that “the media is the message.” It’s true that media often entails audience. (Long-duration megaliths like Facebook, aside, how many people over 40 would follow a Tumblr or Pinterest account?) But rhetorical canons have constancies that make carefully or haphazardly thought arguments transparent enough in virtually any medium. Although iMovie can make anyone a director in a hurry, we need only look to Hollywood to know that slickly packaged films can still be blissfully devoid of much intelligent content.

Researching Public Issues with Twitter

Kendall Gerdes — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:21:41 +0000

Author:

Kendall Gerdes

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Class Twitter account, @rhetoric306, with Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (5th ed.) as background

I ask my RHE 306 class, Rhetoric and Writing, to focus their writing for the semester around a single public issue. I want students in my class to concentrate on the kinds of disagreements that, however intractable, demand a response. So I ask them to frame their issues as policy questions. As we near the time when I ask students to begin researching their issues in earnest, I've been looking for ways to improve my lesson on library research.

I usually tour students around the library website, walk them through different resources, databases, and ways to search the library site. I also like to give them an article that cites it sources and show them how to track down these sources' originals. They tend to come away from this exercise as big fans of Google Scholar—probably because it's not too far away from what for most of them is already their primary research tool: Google.

Incorporating Your Own Research

Because I allow my students to select their own topics for the semester, I often get a wide range of mostly current public issues. I'm not a news junkie, but I could be, so I restrict my news intake to my favorite cable news podcast and to Twitter. That usually gives me some broad knowledge about the kinds of topics my student choose. As I set my students to in-class exercises like practicing summaries, I like to bring in articles I find that relate to students' topics and maybe challenge their established ways of thinking.

Where do I find those kinds of articles? Well, Twitter. I've been on Twitter (@kendalljoy) for about 5 years, and because I like to read everything I've missed since the last time I checked Twitter, I like to keep the list of people I follow relatively small and manageable. That means I unfollow people I don't read carefully and add new followers only when they have consistently interesting tweets.

Twitter for Instant Research

I only just realized I've been depriving students of one of my own main research tools: Twitter. Yes, they need to learn to do scholarly research using the library resources, but this kind of research often leads to useful finds on an issue's background and history, or to relatively refined opinion writing that's been through a slower editorial gatekeeping process. They need all that. But sometimes they can't distinguish it from anything else they'd find online: daily news, blogs, etc. But that kind of up-to-the-minute material is useful, too, especially when students are writing about issues that are even now the subject of public debate and new policy proposals: gun control, immigration reform, abortion restrictions, and the like.

I'm developing a lesson plan to teach my students to conduct research with Twitter. (In a few weeks, I'll post it to the DWRL's Lesson Plans site) What I envision is a class Twitter account (@rhetoric306) and an initial requirement of a professional Twitter account (I'll allow students to use personal account but invite them to create a fresh start if they'd like); a proposed hash tag for class tweets that is short, unique, and informative; and a tweet introducing one high-quality Twitter account relevant to their topic that they'd like the class to follow. The goal will be to get students to help each other conduct current research even as they learn to distinguish between the kinds of material they'll find informally online and the more academic resources they'll need to get through the library.

Twitter Dreams

I've been looking for ways to incorporate more digital and social media into my classes, but I can be choosy about fitting the form to the lesson. I'm excited about using Twitter to teach public issues research because it feels both a little technologically adventurous and because its germane to the classroom topic. My hope is that my students will invent ways of using our Twitter network to help each other and to write that I haven't been able to anticipate.

Meanwhile, I'm drawing up guidelines to help them formally learn to use the medium and to maximize Twitter's research potential. I can already imagine the conversations we'll provoke about commonplaces, expertise, journalistic reporting versus opinion writing, and invention in 140 characters. Are you using Twitter in your classroom? What are the issues you'd want a lesson plan to address? What resources have you found for students using Twitter in class? Tweet your answers to me @kendalljoy!

Negotiating Student-Instructor Relationships on Facebook

Michael Roberts — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 02:03:51 +0000

Author:

Michael Roberts

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"facebook" by pshab on flickr

All young instructors know it: that dreaded moment when a student, former or current, adds you as a "friend" on Facebook. We encourage students to call us by our first names, and cultivate a sense of informal comfort in the classroom. As young people closer in age to our students than our advisors, we also realize that Facebook has become a near-universal social networking outlet, filled not only with friends but cousins, colleagues, and (gulp) parents. But besides the obvious privacy issues, the friend request from the student brings up another social negotiation: is it appropriate, or desirable, to become friends with a former student, in any sense of the word?

I don't know if, as Chris Ortiz y Prentice suggests, “you could describe the entire social apparatus of modern-day public schools... as the protection of the adults from the students' sexualities, and vice versa,” but a certain amount of anxiety lingers regarding student-teacher interaction, even at the college level. Even as we encourage an egalitarian camaraderie among our students, we work to maintain a clear distinction between instructor and student. We dress the part, we present strict-sounding policy statements, and we speak with authority even we discussion ventures into unsure territory. Unfortunately, it is all the more important for women and young instructors to maintain this authority. If students see the instructor as a friend, mother, or object of lust, the educational relationship could become confused or compromised, which could create problems for both teacher and student. Most instructors I know are therefore (sometimes painfully aware) of the negotiations involved in creating a classroom ethos. Be informal but professional; encourage participation but not over-sharing; be available to discuss coursework but not ex-girlfriends; be friendly but not a friend.

In terms of negotiating social relationships, though, Facebook is the Wild West. The near-universality of the website also brings with it serious confusion as to its role in the social lives of its users. Some people use Facebook as a professional networking tool, while others use it as a venue to publish their most intimate thoughts and feelings. So what does it mean when a student friends an instructor on Facebook? Is she trying to make a professional contact similar to networking sites like LinkedIn? Is he curious about the instructor's private life, and wanting to start and informal friendship? Is the “friending” the beginning of a flirtation or romantic courtship? It could mean any of these, and additional, more complicated possibilities abound. “Friending” on Facebook is an interesting topic of cultural semantics; the relative novelty of the interface means that the significance of the act is still in flux in our culture, and has diversely rich meanings for different user communities. While interesting, though, this cultural confusion is dangerous for student-teacher relationships, and most of my colleagues wisely avoid Facebook friendships with students.

This social networking issue gained particular relevance for me last year, though, when I taught Rhetoric 309K: The Rhetoric of Facebook. In the class we studied some of the social issues I describe above, as well as issues of privacy, accessibility, and marketability that arise on the website. Not only did the class use Facebook as its object of study; we also used Facebook as the medium through which much of the class was conducted. Each student created a new class-only Facebook profile, and friended class profile as well as each other. They had to update their profiles week by week, updating research, posting screen shots and analysis, and commenting on their classmates' progress. In general this ad-hoc Facebook network worked so much better than my previous forays into class blogging or discussion boards; the students were already fluent with the technologies of writing, sharing, and commenting, and could focus more on the content of the class, which happened to be rhetorical analysis of those very technologies.

The Facebook networking of our class had unintended social consequences, however. The students had to write at least one Facebook post a week, but were free to share more if they chose to. Some students did, and their posts were not always related to the coursework. Some would invite the class to their a capella concerts or basketball games; others would post their articles in The Daily Texan. When a student had a birthday, many of her classmates wrote on her Facebook wall wishing her a good one. A few students even posted funny videos that were borderline inappropriate for a college classroom. In short, some students used Facebook like their audience was their friend group.

The student interactions with me also became more and more informal. Since I distributed assignment updates on Facebook, most of my students contacted me via Facebook message instead of email. These messages were, predictably, often less than formal, and occasionally used the misspellings and abbreviations common to text messages. In fact, many of them were probably sent from smart phones. Embracing the technology, I held office hours on Facebook chat from my usual office in Parlin. I had record numbers of students ask questions on the chat program, but the interactions also veered into the personal, funny, or inappropriate in ways that had never happened in face-to-face conversations. In short, I was delighted at how comfortable my students with communicating with me in this novel format, but also a little concerned about maintaining the distance and authority required to conduct the class.

I addressed these issues by bringing them to the forefront of our in-class discussion. Both semesters, in the second unit on rhetorical analysis, I discussed both my classroom ethos and their interactions with me and each other. I chuckled at a few anonymous students' misspelled messages, but then moved on to how the technologies might affect their self-presentation even in the classroom. These conversations were very productive, and did not shut down student participation. By the end of the year, most of my students had a pretty sophisticated understanding of what the social and rhetorical stakes of Facebook actions are, including posting, liking, and, of course, friending.

That said, I still do not accept friend requests from students, current, or former. In my class on Facebook, we had the time to discuss the nuanced social jockeying that accompanies the Facebook friendship. In my previous and subsequent teaching experience, I have had neither the time nor the inclination to discuss the implications of social networking. And frankly, some things are better left private.

Theorizing Social Media in Pop Culture Contexts

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:22:40 +0000

Author:

Elzabeth Frye

Image Credit:

Elizabeth Frye

Social media has long stood out to me as something rhetoric instructors should discuss in the classroom. Aside from email, it is perhaps the most commonly used technology by our students and ourselves. Increasingly, it’s the medium through which we access news stories and forms of information and promotion. Yet, because it raises questions about the overlap between public and private and what’s acceptable or desired in terms of pedagogy, I’ve often hesitated to use it. I don’t necessarily want students to find me on Facebook or Twitter, and I think that most of them would feel the same way. That said, using either of those social media sites as a means of communication for my class has been something I’m avoided. While I know other instructors have used them with great results, I haven’t figured out a way to make them work for me. However, I still think they provide a significant opportunity for discussing argument and appeals.

Because I teach RHE 309K – The Rhetoric of Celebrity, it makes a lot of sense to talk about the use of social media in popular culture. Throughout the semester, students observe and analyze various sorts of media—print and digital—in which arguments are made about particular celebrities and cultural relevance. They also are asked to observe and analyze how celebrities make arguments about themselves. Because social media increasingly functions as a legitimate PR campaign for both celebrities and celebrities as businesses, examining the field allows them to think about digital ethos, argument, and multiple audiences.

I ask them to examine a celebrity Twitter feed or Facebook page of their choice and then in a developed blog post on the class blog to evaluate the celebrities’ social media presences in terms of argument and rhetoric. They consider who appears to be speaking, i.e. if it appears to be the celebrities themselves or their handlers. I ask them to think about how the celebrities imagine or gesture to a viewing audience. I also ask, what kind of ethos is promoted? Are there other rhetorical strategies being used (kairos, logos, pathos)? Are there conversations with others? Who is being addressed or not addressed? Because we’ve already dealt so much with visual rhetoric, students also examine the visual impact of the page and how it connects with the celebrities’ images in terms of other images that are circulating about the celebrities. Students also post screenshots to the blog.

In class we discuss whether there seems to be a common rhetoric and whether celebrity use of social media appears to be different from or seems to align with regular folks’ tweeting and posting. The exercise allows all of us to discuss social media in a way that preserves personal boundaries but is also directly relevant to the content of the course.